The background: We always prick up our ears up here at New band of the day whenever we hear there's a new act hailing from Sheffield. This is, after all, a city that has bequeathed such landmarks of extreme popular entertainment as ABC's The Lexicon Of Love, The Human League's Dare!, Heaven 17's Penthouse And Pavement, Cabaret Voltaire's Red Mecca and Pulp's Different Class, so please forgive our knee-jerk anticipation. Unfortunately, Skeletons are not the latest in this long line of glorious sonic explorers from Britain's fifth city who use radically intelligent electronic techniques to bring avant-garde ideas to the mainstream. Instead, they're one of those Arctic Monkeys-style Sheffield bands, a no-nonsense, five-piece, four-square bunch of indie geezers who take their name from a gang of south Yorkshire thugs and their inspiration from 40 years of guitars, bass, and drum-based rock'n'roll. Their music, conventional in approach and attack, might have some force, but no way does it use the full power of the imagination.

Skeletons, who emerged last year from Sheffield's invite-only, CCTV-monitored Club 60, have some skeletons in their closet, principal among them that they had a previous incarnation as ThisGirl, who formed way back in 1999, were signed to Fierce Panda, and made several fair stabs at a sound that could reasonably be described as Jeff Buckley singing Nirvana. Today, despite a claim, ludicrous now that we've heard them, that they're influenced by jazz legend and R&B uber-producer Quincy Jones, and their own description of their music on their MySpace as "Thelonious Monk meets The Kinks meets T-Bone Walker at a tea party", really Skeletons sound an awful lot like Stereophonics. They've got a song called Rough As Sandpaper and, now that they mention it, singer Liam Creamer's raw, ragged tonsils do painfully recall those other masters of vocal hoarse play, Kelly Jones and his croaky Welsh chum James Dean Bradfield, while the musicians hammer and blast away at their tools with a workmanlike lack of finesse.

Apparently, though, you've got to see them live to fully appreciate Skeletons' intensity and iridescent invention. And so, in the interests of truth and pursuit of happiness, we recently caught them in the act, literally, of standing on a stage at a venue called the 229 Club on London's Great Portland Street where they performed in a manner that was thoroughly lacking in visual thrills. Only the singer, a regular manic street preacher, provided any focus, barking at all and sundry and dramatically throwing himself around, jumping into the crowd so as to ensure everyone's attention. But the abiding impression among the assembled was that Iggy Pop's position as the electrifying frontman of our age remains safe, and that Skeletons are not quite the exhilarating sonic terrorists we'd been led to expect.